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These devices have a huge marketing problem. Like the Alexa commercial that shows somebody pausing a Prime TV show to order something from the Amazon store. Cool, I guess--except I can already order stuff while watching TV by using my smartphone, so the value proposition is completely absent.

And also, annoying for Echo device users, since the use of the word 'Alexa' will trigger the device, and thus mute/drop the volume so that you can't hear what is said next... I guess it could be worse, since the volume reduction means the device doesn't hear the command and try to execute it as well!

TBH, I don't understand why they couldn't add a circuit that checks if the microphone is being activated by the device's own speaker, and ignore it. Some sort of simple phase inverting circuit from the speaker that gets summed with the microphone input ought to do it. It's not exactly rocket science and they're doing complex phased-array/beam-forming stuff with the microphones already, so it's not like the engineers are idiots?

Google detects if it's being activated by a TV show or recording by fingerprinting the audio and disabling the hotword if millions of devices all activate at the same time or with the same fingerprint.

It's a very impressive infrastructure, and works pretty well too.

It would be pretty cool if it could update you on things you've asked for in the past that were not possible then but are now possible.

"Hey, 3 months ago you asked for the forecast according to the ECMWF weather model, and I couldn't answer you. But now I can, so go ahead and try!".

I wonder if that is too far on the "creepy scale". Everyone probably knows that Amazon has a full record of everything they have asked their Alexa, but I am not sure it is smart to repeatedly remind people of this.

Phrasing comes into play here. Instead of:

> "Hey, 3 months ago you asked for the forecast according to the ECMWF weather model, and I couldn't answer you. But now I can, so go ahead and try!".

What might work more effectively is

"We've been improving our weather forecasting and you can now get the forecast in your area according to a range of new models, including the often requested ECMWF weather model! Give it a try now!"

This attempt to obscure the fact that it's actually super-targeted can also backfire too, though. It wouldn't take too many of them for a savvy user to be like... now wait a minute.

Thinking back to this classic where Target figures out the trick to not creeping out someone they suspect may be pregnant is to shuffle the maternity coupons in with a bunch of other random stuff: https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-targ...

Relevant quotes:

What Target discovered fairly quickly is that it creeped people out that the company knew about their pregnancies in advance.

“If we send someone a catalog and say, ‘Congratulations on your first child!’ and they’ve never told us they’re pregnant, that’s going to make some people uncomfortable,” [snip] So Target got sneakier about sending the coupons. The company can create personalized booklets; [snip]

“Then we started mixing in all these ads for things we knew pregnant women would never buy, so the baby ads looked random. We’d put an ad for a lawn mower next to diapers. We’d put a coupon for wineglasses next to infant clothes. That way, it looked like all the products were chosen by chance. And we found out that as long as a pregnant woman thinks she hasn’t been spied on, she’ll use the coupons. She just assumes that everyone else on her block got the same mailer for diapers and cribs. As long as we don’t spook her, it works.”

> As long as we don't spoil her it works.

Sounds much closer to hunting, literally targeted marketing.

The problem with Alexa is that Amazon runs their R&D team like a consumer research organization.

I mean, you gotta listen to every word that comes out of the customer's mouth right?

Their Principles are too reductive to even guarantee that copies of other people's ideas are successful. For as much of a genius as he may be, Jeff Bezos has created an organization of automatons.

Lots of people working there have good ideas that they never bring up, because past experience has taught them that it's a waste of time. So it's not that the workers are automatons, but rather that the workers have learned that the organization wants and what it doesn't want, and don't waste their time with what the org doesn't want. The individuals who comprise the organization are fine, but the meta-organism that is the organization is diseased.

[obligatory disclaimer: I worked there years ago, but no longer do.]

So an organisation full of automatons?

Effectively yes, but with a defense of the people.

If it did that unprompted, it would be a privacy issue. You may have asked it something that you don't want people currently in the room with you to know about.

It doesn't need to announce it verbally, just including capability updates in the (currently useless) emails that they already send their customers would do.

Discovberability is solvable. Amazon has chosen not to focus on solving it, and instead they are focused on sheer volume if skills and ease of use to make them. A lot of Alexa skills can be made in a day.

I'd argue this is the wrong thing to solve for. The best skills take a long time to make and require privledged access. Sonos, Spotify and others have this, and they work amazing. It's the large mass of Alexa skills they were quickly made and that don't have privledged access that are dragging the whole experience down.

And this is entirely Amazon's doing.

So, just like every app I use that doesn't put effort into making me aware of their new features (but probably worse, as it likely takes more effort to find those features).

It's humbling (and annoying) when you think of yourself as a power user of some application to find out from some semi-new user of it that there's a new feature that would have made your life much easier if you had only known it was added a year or two ago.

There's only so much time to learn about the tools you use, much less the changes in them over time. How do I find out if GNU grep has some interesting new feature in the version that ships with the next version of the distro I use? Or rsync? Or tmux/screen?

This problem definitely seems worse with smaller tools, since there's a lot of them and they are often packages together by some other party. Not every project is as large and used as much but such a large population as Firefox, which arguably does a very good job of advertising new features. But you can definitely tell it takes them a lot of time and effort to do so, and a smaller project may not find much traction if they tried the same strategy.

>> "Hey, we know you tried to ask your Echo to report its volume level before and it didn't work

This makes me shudder. Such a functionality would mean that they stored your failed request in some sort of database, a database that they later used to send you a personalized marketing email. A machine cataloging our voice for later inspection is a very dark future. Alexa should delete and scrub any iota of voice that it doesn't instantly understand.

"Oh, remember last week when I though you were asking me to buy you a pot plant? I now realize you were asking me to buy you some pot from Canada. It will be arriving in two days."

"I didn't understand it at the time, but I now realize that you were yelling at your husband Alex, not Alexa. Your social credit score has been adjusted to reflect this negative interaction."

They are 100% storing everything and so is google. You can actually go to google and replay all the recordings they have saved of you.

You can also replay the audio from all your Alexa commands in the app. In iOS it’s in Settings -> Alexa Account -> History.

Some of the recordings are unintentionally hilarious though, it turns out. When I looked at the history page, there were a bunch of times when Google seemed to think I was saying "b b b b b b b b b" repeatedly? Anyway, when I played the audio back, it seems my alarm clock's beeping had triggered the Google Assistant, which then obviously failed to understand the beeps!

> Such a functionality would mean that they stored your failed request in some sort of database, a database that they later used to send you a personalized marketing email.

I don't think this kind of thing would need (or even benefit from) actual voice recordings when it comes to the "new functionality" part of things. I would expect something more like a running tally of the X most common failed interactions after running the transcript through a fuzzy-match filter, and a long list of accounts associated with each.